How Successful People Beat Stress Essay

How Successful People Beat Stress by: Travis Bradberry

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe they can make things happen and those who believe things happen to them.
The first group are convinced that the outcome of their lives and careers is more or less in their own hands, and they wouldn’t have it any other way.
The second group take more of a Forrest Gump approach—they sit around and wait for the bus to take them somewhere.
University of Florida psychologist Tim Judge and his colleagues have shown overwhelmingly that people who feel that they control the events in their lives (more than the events control them) and are confident in their abilities end up doing better on nearly every important measure of work performance.
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In Judge’s

We all know that living under stressful conditions has serious physical and emotional consequences. So why do we have so much trouble taking action to reduce our stress levels and improve our lives? Researchers at Yale have the answer. They found that intense stress actually reduces the volume of gray matter in the areas of the brain responsible for self-control.
As you lose self-control, you lose your ability to cope with stress. It becomes harder for you to keep yourself out of stressful situations, and you’re more likely to create them for yourself (such as by overreacting to people). The Yale research shows us why so many people get sucked into progressive rounds of greater and greater stress until they completely burn out (or worse).
Dwindling self-control is particularly scary when you consider that stress affects physiological functions in the brain, contributing to chronic diseases like hypertension and diabetes. And stress doesn’t stop there—it’s linked to depression, obesity, and decreased cognitive performance.
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